As per the usual birthday post, here we go…

We shape with our senses and our influence, I wrote in my journal back in February. I was reading an article in which Alice Wong and Ed Young have an interesting conversation about senses, particularly regarding the question, “What counts as seeing?” I wrote down the quote:

“By stoking that sense of wonder, by getting [people] to spend some time inside the heads or other body parts of other creatures, we can make a case for why their lives matter in their own right.” – Ed Young

I then briefly wrote about a dream I had in which I entered a room/had to share a room with large spiders everywhere. They had a mutely paralyzing effect on me, like they were draining my energy and I had to leave.

We shape with our senses and our influence. And we are shaped by the senses and influence of others. Yet our imagination is often limited when trying to describe the personal experiences of others, simply because of perceptual differences, or, the means for sensory experience are physically something other than an able-bodied human: insect eyes, a flower petal, the throat of a purring cat, colorblindness.

I dreamt about being overwhelmed, but how did the spiders perceive me? I used the phrase “seeing/being in shared room” in my journal, which meant my awareness keyed into something matter-of-fact: the spiders certainly belonged, they were aware of me, they were influencing my presence, but I cannot say what was happening in their awareness.

These ideas are classic, that we are but neurons in the brain of a collective earth, paying attention but unable to be or inhabit what we are not.

I wrote down other things that month, things like “escapism – unduly criticized” or “if you imagine anything ever and turn it into art – escapism? Why are some modes accepted and others not…’political apathy'” is what critics are trying to get at with the word — thoughts influenced by Joseph Earl Thomas speaking during a webinar with the Center for Imagination. Often, he spoke, escapism or the imagination or (enter any mode of recreation, luxury, pleasure, relaxation, meditation…) exists “closer to desire than realism does.” And confronting desire or joy can benefit our ability to process or comprehend the alternatives: grief, anxiety, pain, political or social turmoil…the works.

But, sure, such things can also become a slippery slope into denial or complicity. Nonetheless, Thomas felt that escapism doesn’t exist (and even after death, culpability can live on). Truly escaping cultural context and circumstance is impossible. Even in the example of my dream, leaving the room didn’t erase my awareness of that room, and it doesn’t excuse me from current stereotypes and manners of instinct regarding giant spiders occupying the innards of a human house. Or the fact that this dream happened within the context of my brain, which choreographed my perception of itself within the context of my 35 years of life.

But, let’s think again about denial and complicity. Harboring such modes of being means contextualizing the person within whatever is happening in their life or in the world. Which obviously means they have yet to escape anything at all. Which brings me to a quote I wrote down in May:

“The world keeps touching me,” Sumanth Prabhaker’s daughter.

The world touches all of us, constantly. And all we can ever do is pass on the suggestion to act.

And what better modes of suggestion than art or direct protest, both borne through our ability to use the imagination, where the rules of even kindness break down, where power is bewildered and navigation, endless. Where the ways of living out one’s life stun the status quo.

“It means all of us are kind of constrained and trapped by the confines of our own senses. But it also is wonderfully expansive because it means that nothing can do everything.” – Ed Young

And I feel that is what the status quo often expects of us, to do everything. But, let us return to the beginning of this post, where we are invited to rethink how other creatures perceive the world, through some sort of brain or simply through a body part, like the stem of a plant — the imagination that is required! These invitations, however, are not the same as asking us to do or be everything, and I hope this distinction is clear.

I suppose the point of this piece is to suggest something. Something like expanding awareness, acknowledging what needs to be acknowledged, but understanding that we alone cannot solve the world’s problems. There’s a reason there’s a diversity of beings on this earth, to occupy niches and alternative modes of expressing energy, or something like that. So what happens if we listen more? Perhaps the entirety of my life is an amalgam of suggestions, heard and kept or shed away. Something malleable at least. And that’s all anyone should expect.

I am writing this piece the night before a backpacking trip, and I am rushing through it. There is a part of me that wants all of this to make more sense, to be more, but I don’t have the time now. What will happen if I just let this piece be what it is? I will set the piece to auto-publish on my birthday, but I will be in the Utah desert, walking my senses through the rooms of a canyon. The world will touch me. And I will write things down. Things like suggestions. And I will be reshaped. Thirty-five years of being on this earth means thirty-five years of realism and imagination. Thirty-five years of anything but escape.

Feliz Cumple a Mi

Stay tuned for the upcoming Moonbox Notes #20: Diciembre 2023!